Item/block texture from URL?

Why wouldn't this be possible? Could someone explain this to me?

I know you need spout to create custom blocks/items with custom textures.
Everyone needs an internet connection to go on a public server, that means you could load a picture (texture) from an url and then set the block texture from that url?
Why wouldn't this be possible?

 

If you involve a client mod it would be totally possible.

 

Yeah, I know but why wouldn't it be possible to do it without that?

You can render pictures from urls to maps so why wouldn't it work on blocks too?
(http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/imgmap/)

 

But the difference is, that the client ask the server for the map content, while it never ask the server for textures.

If you want, you can use maps and itemframes as custom textures, but you can only put them on 4 sides of the block.
Making "new" blocks with this technic is pretty hard, as you need to remove the vanilla behaviour of itemframes.

(Maps for new textures make only sense if you have a very limited number of them, e.g. for infoscreens at your spawn - I actually just wrote a plugin for that )

 

Okay, thanks. This explains what I wanted to know!